I think the problem with “we refuse to accept wins from a bad team because they might not even win at all” could be solved by a system that says “if X number of promised wins aren’t achieved, then the team still owes them indefinitely until they are indeed won.”
So if the Jaguars traded away “8 wins over the next two seasons” to the Rams, but the Jaguars only won a total of six games in those two seasons combined, then…they still are on the hook to have two more wins deducted from their future seasons. The Jags would enter their third season still owing those two wins. And so on and on. They wouldn’t be let off the hook.
Just like financial debt, the debt persists until it is paid. It doesn’t go away because you failed to earn enough income to pay back the bank.
I still think win-trading is a bad idea, but the problems aren’t unsolvable.
A bigger question is how much we (the customers!) want the game of football to about the play on the field done by the players, the game in the coaching booths/sidelines done by the coaches, the game of current roster management done by the coaches, trainers, and scouts, or the game of long term roster development done by the football ops department management, or the game of money chasing done by the owners?
ISTM everything except play on the field shouldn’t matter much.
Anything that amounts to “gamesmanship” of the higher level meta rules is a form of dishonest cheating, morally if not legally. As Lombardi almost said: “Winning today on the field is the only thing. All else rest is just skulduggery beneath an honest athlete or sportsman.”
In an ideal world this would be the case, but fans are humans and hence imperfect (maybe complex is a better word?). Recall the Jaguars fans cheering when the Jaguars lost to the Bears last year, catapulting them ahead of the Jets in the Trevor Lawrence sweepstakes. The fans were clearly willing to give up on this season in exchange for the next 10 years being brighter.
Also, as to the idea, it’s an unmitigated to disaster that would destroy the sport in short order. Very little upside, huge downsides.
One I don’t think I saw mentioned: your team fights really hard to get 11 wins, but because they’re in a tough division with another winner, and their conference was really tough this year, they’re only in the running for the last wildcard spot.
A mediocre team with 8 wins, but has +4 traded wins, gets to 12 wins and kicks your 11-win team out of the playoffs despite having 3 fewer actual wins. How do you feel?
I said that this kind of trade can only be allowed in the offseason, so during the actual season your team and its coaches should be aware of other teams’ trades, and plan its strategy accordingly.
Also, this is reminiscent of people saying that it is unfair that the Washington Football Team made the 2020 playoffs with a 7-9 record, but the Miami Dolphins were left out when they had a 10-6 record. Everyone should be aware of the rules and accept the consequences of those rules. If they don’t accept it, then propose a better solution to the current status quo and hope it gets implemented.
Plan it’s strategy accordingly? “Hey guys, that other team that bought 4 wins might beat take our playoff spot, so let’s switch from our plan to not winning more games to switching to our plan to win more games”
We are proposing a solution to this problem: don’t adopt this awful idea.
What’s the point? The point of winning in the regular season is to make the playoffs, but has the downside of making your draft position worse. You’re more likely to want to throw wins away in order to have better draft prospects than try to buy wins and then lose in the first round of the playoffs because your team sucks.
If it’s the last regular season game of the year and Team A is 3 games ahead of Team B who has bought 4 wins, in the race for the division title or wild-card spot, Team A knows the last game is a must-win. Doesn’t sound too hard to me.
True. However, what if those draft prospects don’t pan out? If a GM is aware that he/she sucks at drafting, they might opt to go with the route of “as long as we make it to the dance, there’s a chance we might win it all.”
Which is why I said earlier that the league should cap the number of wins allowed to be added, with 4 wins a good starting point for discussion. Yes, 15 wins would make the whole thing ridiculous.
I’m still trying to understand what problem the OP is trying to solve.
If we want to play Calvinball with the rules, that’s easy. Whether it’s the game rules, the recruiting rules, the trade rules, or the team location and buying / selling rules.
It doesn’t matter if it’s one win or 16. It’s still fundamentally unfair that a team with fewer wins steals a playoff spot from a team with more wins. Yes, this happens with division winners with poor records sometimes, and a lot of people don’t like that rule, they certainly don’t want to add a worse one. At least divisions have upsides of encouraging rivalries, comparing similar schedules, etc. This idea basically has no benefits.
My original line of thinking was that when dealing with franchise-changing players like Watson, how much is acceptable to give up? Is getting Watson worth dinging your record by 2 games for the next several seasons?
In that respect, regular season wins can possibly be an even more salivating trade tool than first round picks.
I’m not sure what, either…it seems like it was a thought experiment on the part of the OP, and nothing in this discussion so far has shown me any evidence that it could, in any way, be a good idea.
The NFL strives for competitiveness and parity between all teams, and, of all the major pro sports leagues, they do a reasonably good job of it. There are several now long-standing league policies – equal revenue sharing on the TV contract, the draft, free agency, and the salary cap – which go a long way towards placing teams on a relatively equal footing, and allow the smaller-market teams to effectively compete against the bigger-market teams.
Because of all of the above, teams can, and do, regularly turn the corner from cellar-dwellers to playoff teams, and often in the span of just a year or two.
Yes, there are some teams which have been in long-term stretches of mediocrity (or worse), like the Browns, Lions, and, until recently, the Bills (the Cardinals were in that boat for many years, too). But, in all of those cases, that’s a sign of long-term dysfunction of those teams’ ownership and management. They are chronically making poor decisions – they aren’t hiring the right people for the front office and coaching staff, they aren’t doing a good job of evaluating player talent (hence drafting poorly and making bad choices in free agency), and they aren’t building a positive, winning culture.
Allowing them to trade away wins does absolutely nothing to fix that, and it just gives the poorly-run teams another way to demonstrate that they’re poorly run.
If teams can already “afford” to make a trade using the trading currencies in existence (draft picks, other players, cash, etc), how does creating a different parallel currency help? Any trade they could do already they can still do after this new currency goes live.
In one sense you make the game of trading more interesting. Because you’re introducing a new “exchange rate”. Which affords the opportunity for different teams to assess that exchange rate differently. And provides another topic for the endless parade of daytime sports yakyak talking heads to speculate bloviate about.
I want to watch big dudes play the game. They can keep the entire rest of the business out of the press as far as I’m concerned.
Here’s an alternative idea. Sell forfeits for cash. Totally aboveboard and according to the rules. It enables teams to trade current success for additional $ to buy better players for later. ANy team can sell any future scheduled game as a forfeit. And can sell the current game at any time up to the end of regulation. For any price the two GMs can agree to at the time.
What could possibly be the downsides of this? It’d certainly be exciting for the commentators to talk about.
Right, this was primarily a thought experiment of mine that, if it was real, would serve to stir up more wild trades, and discussion amongst the sports media, in the NFL.
The salary cap is still in play. What is the point of having all that cash in excess of the cap if you can’t spend it?
EDIT: unless you mean the owners find a way to funnel the excess cash to themselves. That would totally make sense.
Good point about salary cap. Owners can either pocket the money, or else we enact a rule that the salary cap is increased for each team by the amount of the forfeit revenue. Want more expensive players? Sell a few games.
Also, there’s no reason to limit forfeits to the two contending teams. If teams A & B are playing one another and A is ahead but team C’s playoff chances would be better if team B won that game, why can’t Team C offer to pay team A $X to forfeit? If Team D is willing to pay team B more to forfeit the same game, then the B-D deal goes through and A-C is blocked.
Obviously I’m just Calvinballing here, but if the idea is to just throw more jokers on the pile so there are more ways for teams to play the meta game at each level, I don’t see why my idea is any less good than any other.
This idea is ignoring the central reason for football; it’s all about winning. (Okay, maybe it’s all about money but let’s put aside such cynicism.)
The reason teams work to sign up top players is to increase the number of wins the team makes. If you’re just going to sell those wins, what motive do you have for signing top players?